Find bargains on Uncle Sam's eBay

By Donna Freedman

Wanna buy a defibrillator? A snowboard? Some office furniture, a piano or an arc welder? Has Uncle Sam got a deal for you!

Those are a few of the thousands of items available through government property auctions. Decommissioned battleships, horses, defunct factories, exercise bikes, construction equipment, purses, lighthouses, slot machines, helicopters and even a strip club are some of the things the government has put out for public bidding.

These aren't traditional "outcry" auctions, where you go in person and call out your bid. Most of these goods are auctioned over the Internet.

Think of it as Uncle Sam's eBay, because the number and variety of items are staggering, and the deals can be screamin':

• Florida businessman Matt Geary bought four kayaks for $80 apiece and sold a couple of them for more than he paid for all four.

• Adebayo Ogunmeno, a Midwest attorney, bought transcription equipment for just $7.

• Pauline Singletary bought a $5,000 copier for a few hundred dollars and an antique oak roll-top desk for $120.

Because the items being sold are surplus, outmoded or forfeited/seized, conditions vary from new-looking to outright trashed. For example, here's the description of a 1984 ambulance that was available in Arizona: "Does not run and parts may be missing. Recommended for scrap use only." Maybe that's why the bid was only $126 recently.

But if you're patient and/or lucky, you might find yourself a heck of a bargain at a federal, county or city auction. My father paid just $700 for a 25,000-watt diesel generator through a school district auction. The unit had only 402 hours of use. New, it would have cost between $7,000 and $8,000.

Getting started

First, a warning: I did a quick search for "government auctions," and one of the first links I found wanted to charge me $18.95 a month to get the inside scoop on government auctions.

And those late-night TV ads promising you inside information? Hey, late-night ads also made us think that blankets with sleeves were a great idea. What you need to know about government auctions is available for free. Do not pay for it.

There's no single clearinghouse for all the different types of government auctions, but here's a quick rundown of some good sources:

The General Services Administration features the GSA Auctions site, on which items are divided into easy-to-use categories. (Who knew you could buy veterinary equipment from Uncle Sam?) Sometimes the goods are tagged as surplus because they're getting older; cars and trucks, for example, tend to be rotated out after five years.

Other items are "unused, underutilized or superseded," according to the Web site, and it's more cost-effective for the government to sell these items off than to pay to manage, warehouse and insure them. These auctions brought in more than $230 million in 2007, according to GSA spokeswoman Caren Auchman.

Video: California is for sale

The USA.gov site includes pages both for federal property auctions and state and local surplus property auctions, which makes it easy to find deals in your neighborhood or within driving distance. (Of course, if the deal is good enough, it might be worth an overnight trip.)

Some private companies partner with government agencies to promote these sales. Bid4Assets provides links to local, state and federal government sales, among other things. I saw everything from office furniture and pickups to a "speed vac refrigerated condensation trap" from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Liquidity Services operates two sites, GovDeals.com and GovLiquidation.com, for the U.S. government. The former sells government surplus and confiscated items, and the latter specializes in Department of Defense surplus.

Company spokeswoman Julie Davis says that the majority of the approximately 1.2 million registered bidders are small-business owners. "We're matching the needs of buyers with the needs of the government," Davis says.

Along with the office furniture and phones are some interesting tales of frugality. One guy bought 96 beds for $8 each from GovDeals.com, then took them apart so he could use some of the lumber for flooring in his shop and the rest for stairs and woodworking projects in his home.

Matt Geary, who owns a building-supply business, bought a Ford F-900 flatbed truck for $3,500 when scrap aluminum prices were at their peak. He sold the extruded aluminum bed to a recycling company for $2,900 and replaced it with the flatbed from another auction truck.

Like the Bid4Assets site, GovDeals.com features some surprising items. Several that jumped out at me: approximately 80 unopened packs of Pokémon cards (recent bid: $45), a pickup load of socks (recent bid: $352) and a pair of swords (recent bid: $6).

Continued: Seek and ye shall bid

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